“Rhetoric and Science” (English 508)

Spring 2020 | Catherine Gouge | cgouge@wvu.edu | Tuesday 4-6:50pm

This course is designed for students who are interested in learning more about the relationship between rhetoric and science. All ENGL graduate students are welcome and encouraged to enroll. No expertise in rhetoric or science is required. Course Description

“Rhetoric and Science” will explore the audiences, purposes, and conventions of scientific arguments as well as the role of specific texts in shaping scientific disciplines and debates. Throughout the term, we will look at scientific controversies and consider the following questions: What does it mean to understand science as a rhetorical practice and why is it productive to do so? What role does rhetoric have in negotiating the cultural authority and power of scientific knowledge? What are the roles of different texts and rhetorical practices in shaping scientific knowledge? Course Assignments

Students will complete weekly assigned reading and regular response papers, lead a discussion, and write a proposal for and a 10-12 page conference paper. Sample Texts

Booher and Jung’s Feminist Rhetorical Science Studies, Teston’s Bodies in Flux, Happe’s The Material Gene, Condit’s “How Bad Science Stays That Way,” Prelli’s “The Rhetorical Construction of Scientific Ethos,” and Ceccarelli’s “Manufactured Scientific Controversy.”

Note: This ENGL 508 will have some advanced undergraduate students attending as well. ENGL 408 is one of the core course options for “Medical Humanities and Health Studies” minors, so there may be students from other majors in the course. Because of this, I expect the course to be vibrant, a mixed class of grad/advanced undergrad students who will complete and discuss overlapping reading and graded assignments. In addition to these assignments in common, Graduate ENGL 508 students will be expected to lead a discussion and write a 10-12-page conference-length paper.

english 606:introduction to the digital humanities

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:ERIN BROCK CARLSON 

ERIN.CARLSON@MAIL.WVU.EDU | COLSON 337

MONDAYS 4.00-6.50 PM COLSON G06

at the end of this course,you will possess:

knowledge of the scope of the DigitalHumanitiesgreater understanding of the ways thatrhetoric, literature, creative writing, andprofessional writing intersect with DHfamiliarity with current trends, debates, andtopics related to digital, public-facing workheightened awareness of how identity (race,gender identity, sexuality, locality, etc.)influences our digital lives and, practiced drafting and creation skills inacross digital platforms.

~likely~requirements:

weekly readingresponsesseveral informalpresentations ontrends, projects, andtools in the fieldannotated bibliographyresearch paper collaborative digitalproject

Are you curious about how digital spaces and our material livesintersect? Do you want to know more about how the humanities arebeing captured in digital spaces and through digital methods?

English 618A

Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction

Mondays, 7-9:50

Colson Hall 223

Professor: Mark Brazaitis

Write, Revise, Write, Revise, Write, Revise, Revise, Revise

In this class, you will share your best fiction writing with a

workshop of your peers. You will receive careful, thoughtful

commentary on your work from your peers and your professor.

Depending on the size of the class, you will be writing two to

four stories. (Novelists are also welcome. Be prepared to submit

chapters as well as an outline of your book.) Submitting revisions of

work you’ve put forward early in the workshop is encouraged.

In addition to your own writing, we will read three contemporary

short story collections and a contemporary novel or two, both as a way

to discuss technique and to examine what is currently being published

in the field of literary fiction.

Finally, we will have a discussion about literary markets and

approaches to getting published.

Authors whose work we may read: Amy Bloom, Elizabeth

Graver, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, Stuart Dybek, Mary

Gaitskill, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ivan Turgenev, Philip Roth, Francisco

Goldman, Janet Peery, Randall Kenan, and José Saramago.

Author whose work we will certainly read: You.

Reading Poetry, Writing about Poetry, Teaching Poetry

English 632 Professor Johanna Winant

Tuesdays, 7pm __________________________________________________________________

This course is an introduction to poetry and poetics for graduate

students. We will read poems written in English from the previous 600 years, and you will leave the course comfortable with the vocabulary of poetic terms, techniques, genres, and forms, able to read and analyze a poem closely, capable of making an argumentative claim about a poem and using quotations from the poem to prove it, and also, ready to teach poetry from any historical era in your own classrooms.

The course will be discussion-based, and the assignments will ask you to produce both literary scholarship and original pedagogical materials. So, for example, we will talk a lot about how to write skillfully at the graduate level, and you will write short response essays focusing on close reading, reviews of articles, and a conference paper (you’ll leave the course with an abstract ready to submit to conferences). But we’ll also talk about effective pedagogy, and you will design your own lesson plans and exercises to use in teaching your students how to read and write about poetry.

ENGL 671: Spring 2020 Prof. Lisa Weihman

2020 Visions of 1922

British and Irish Modernist Studies after the Annus Mirabilis

“The Christian Era ended at midnight on Oct. 29-30 of last year. You are now in the year 1 p.s.U. [post scriptum Ulysses]” – Ezra Pound to H. L. Mencken 1922 is the year that saw the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Isaac Rosenberg’s Poems, Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories, among many other key modernist texts. 1922 is also the year the Irish Free State was established, and Yeats becomes a senator; it is the year F.W. Murnau releases the film Nosferatu; it is the year William Blunden wins the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry and David Garnett (now nearly forgotten) wins the Tait Prize for Lady Into Fox. It is the year Marcel Proust died and the year Philip Larkin was born. The historical and intellectual legacy of 1922 remains a high water mark for modernism as a movement, as the immediate impact of the Great War on art and culture is reassessed and measured. This course will examine the legacy of 1922 and the current state of Modernist Studies as a field, moving outward from a reading of key texts published in that year and their reception through time. We will examine both our evolving understanding of modernism as a global movement and the enduring, often contested canonicity of these English and Irish authors and texts.

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922

ENGL 680: Introduction to Literary Research Spring 2020 Wednesdays 4:00-6:50 G18 Colson Tim Sweet 213 Colson tsweet@wvu.edu

Overview English 680, Introduction to Literary Research, is designed to help graduate students develop academic research and writing skills. While these skills are addressed in other courses, this course provides an explicit foundation for understanding the expectations for and forms of research in literary studies. The Graduate Program Committee has specified that the course cover three areas:

Research methods: locating, evaluating, and incorporating information from a variety of primary and secondary sources Textual studies: understanding the technologies of the transmission of texts Genres of academic writing: understanding the expectations conventions of academic genres

For the first two thirds of the class, we will use Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia as a common text from which to work on these areas; regarding the first two areas particularly, the Notes has a complex textual history (presented differently in the two modern editions) and is amenable to multi-disciplinary research. In the final third of the class, you’ll use the skills you’ve developed in research methods and textual studies to work on a final project on a text of your choice.

Texts Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. William Peden. 1955. U of North Carolina

P, 1996. ISBN: 9780807845882 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. Frank Shuffelton. Penguin, 1999. ISBN:

0140436677 William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott. An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual

Studies. 4th edition. MLA, 2009. ISBN: 9781603290401 Several journal articles available through Wise library Assignments Several library/online research assignments on Notes on Virginia culminating in an assessment

of current scholarly directions Quiz on textual studies Case study on textual variations in a text of your choice Final project (“meta” book review, abstract, annotated bibliography, conference-length paper,

oral presentation) on a text of your choice

English 693: The Classical Tradition Spring 2020

Professor Marilyn Francus Tuesdays 4:00-6:50

This course provides a survey of classical Greek and Roman literature, which was the mainstay of Western education for centuries. Authors, artists, and filmmakers constantly turn to these texts for inspiration, and their adaptations reverberate throughout Western culture̶including Tennyson’s Ulysses, Joyce’s Ulysses, the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where art Thou and Lucas’s Star Wars trilogies; Spike Lee’s Chi-raq; Neil LaBute’s Medea Redux; Shaw’s Pygmalion, Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady; Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra; and Freud’s use of Oedipus. This course will be useful for students interested in understanding the origins of Western literature and culture; creative writing; canon formation; and adaptation. Course Texts: Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound Longinus, On the Sublime Aristophanes, Lysistrata, The Clouds Ovid, selections from Metamorphoses Aristotle, Poetics Plato, Symposium Euripides, Medea, The Bacchae Sappho, selected poetry Homer, The Iliad, The Odyssey Sophocles, Oedipus Rex Horace, Ars Poetica Virgil, The Aeneid

ENGL 782—Current Directions in Literary Studies—Spring 2020

Disciplinarity

Prof. Adam Komisaruk

W 7:00-9:50 PM

…look you, I will be so bold as to tell you I know the disciplines…

Henry V

What is a discipline? How does it come to be recognized as such? How did “Literary and

Cultural Studies” grow to be so capacious, and what if anything may be its limits? How exactly

do practitioners ply their trade? “Disciplinarity”, “interdisciplinarity”, “transdisciplinarity”,

“predisciplinarity” and related modalities have received much attention of late. Major journals in

the field—PMLA in 1996, Poetics Today in 2003, Critical Inquiry in 2004, Early American

Literature in 2008, Postcolonial Studies in 2010, Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2011, Mosaic in

2017, among others—have devoted special issues to investigating and hand-wringing on the

subject. Disciplinary border-crossing has its prominent skeptics, as well. Historian Sean

Wilentz speaks of the “trend for literary critics to write about any subject they please, and in a

tone of serene authority.” The physicist Alan Sokal devised his hoax in the 1990s to prove a lack

of conversibility between science and cultural studies. Eric Slauter points to a “trade deficit”

between English and History, where the former imports more from the latter than it exports to it.

Not even the meaning of “interdisciplinarity”—for example, to what extent it implies

collaboration—is consistent from one discipline to another.

We will begin the course with Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966), including a consideration

of the possible disciplinary or punitive implications of disciplinarity. We will then turn to recent

theorizations of the subject by Andrew Elfenbein (The Gist of Reading, 2018), Harvey Graff

(Undisciplining Knowledge, 2015), Stephen Kellert (Borrowed Knowledge, 2009) and Katie

King (Networked Reenactments, 2012), as well as the aforementioned special journal issues.

Literary-scientific and literary-historicist interactions will be emphasized. Several of our

examples both primary (Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Wordsworth) and secondary (Devin

Griffiths, Jon Klancher, Robert Mitchell, Dahlia Porter, Robin Valenza) will draw on the

Enlightenment, the great age of European encyclopedism, which confronted the intractability of

knowledge to classification and yet tried to classify it all the time. Roughly half the semester’s

readings, however, will be suggested by members of the class according to their disciplinary

strengths and interests. I hope to invite guest speakers from other units that employ

interdisciplinary methods, such as the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, the Center for

Excellence in Disabilities, and the WVU Humanities Center. Collaborative final projects will be

encouraged.

ENGL 793A—Postcolonial Literature and Theory: South Asia

Prof. Gwen Bergner * Spring 2020 * Thursday 4:00-6:50

Postcolonial literature and theory as a field has experienced major turns—to the aesthetic,

the material, the ecocritical, and the posthuman. This course provides an introduction to some of

the foundational texts and concepts and explores new directions in the field through a focus on

the literature of South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Sri Lnaka) and its diasporas in North America

and Britain.

The boom in South Asian literature in the last decades of the 20th century coincided with

the rise of postcolonialism as a field of study. The coincidence is more than accidental given the

work of the Subaltern Studies group, which began in the early 1980s to revise the history of

India, its literature, and its experience of colonialism, thereby shaping the discourse of

contemporary postcolonial theory. Postcolonial studies offered new ways of reading literature

from the former British colonies, opening the canon of works in English to contemporary authors

from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and their diasporas. The focus on South Asian

literature allows us to develop a working knowledge of the history, politics, and culture of the

region, providing crucial context for our reading of the literature.

Beginning with foundational literature and theory (e.g., Rushdie, Spivak, Bhabha,

Mohanty), we’ll consider the influences of Marxism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism,

and nationalism on early postcolonial theory. We will then consider recent literary and critical

responses to globalization, new materialism, ecocriticism, and posthumanism (e.g., Adiga,

Shamsie, Ghosh).

Primary Texts

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (2004)

Romesh Gunesekera, Reef (1994)

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (2003)

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)

Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983)

Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India (1991)

Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (2007)

Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire (2017)

Assignments

• Weekly Discussion Questions

• Short Paper (4-5 pp.) (Balraj Khanna)

• Seminar-length paper

o Prospectus and Annotated Bibliography